Love the tile art. Nice work!
Play game
Pocket DrillPunk's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #18 | 4.441 | 4.441 |
| Overall | #23 | 4.257 | 4.257 |
| Gameplay | #25 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Audio | #39 | 3.971 | 3.971 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution) | #104 | 4.559 | 4.559 |
Ranked from 34 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
Just me! (it was a fun experience!)
Was the resolution a challenge?
Yes! But at the same time it was kinda inspiring. Limiting myself to 64x64 pixels made me focus on other things such as animations, palette, etc. One of my biggest issues was fitting text on the screen, I kept that to a mininum.
What did you learn?
I learned a lot about pixel art! I also had a lot of fun mixing different game genres, it can definitely be challenging at times.
Comments
There's a LOT packed into this jam entry, you should feel proud! I played on normal difficulty and I did feel like I ran into some bugs (all the boss did was defend), but it was a fun experience overall!
You picked a tough genre to balance and mixed in procedural generation to boot; I think the biggest issue is somewhere at the intersection of these. E.g. how rare a particular material is vs what kind of skills it gives me access to vs the return on investment on the cost to use those skills in battle. Because of these imbalances I was gravitating to only 2 or 3 of the many available skills to get the most bang for my buck, and likely missed a bunch of cool stuff.
I liked the graphics in general, and the VFX in particular.
Impressive effort for a solo project! Keep it up :)
Thanks for playing and for the feedback! And don't worry, you're not bashing the game haha, I completely understand your points and there are currently some balancing issues with the game. Some features didn't make the cut and I tried making as many abilities as I could but I was quickly running out of time. So the drill ended up being overpowered, despite having a higher cost for etherdrill.
There are other ways to play, but they're not nearly as effective as just drilling dirt away. Struggle scales with Max HP, and Frost Fuel scales with Jets Fuel. Sparkles scales with everything, so it's the best move for a "balanced" playstyle. But currently there are no incentives to gather more jet fuel. The idea of having empty spaces has to do with this. I wanted to make the cave itself look like a dungeon, not just a "gathering bonanza". When I say I cut some things, I actually mean a LOT of things. I wanted to make a "radar" kinda thing so you could scout for resources, I wanted to make them more relevant at higher levels, and I wanted to make badges to "modify" powers based on elements (more fire pwr, more bio pwr, and so on), and I wanted to make it so certain enemies took more damage from certain elements. But well, maybe I get to do that after the jam rating period!
Anyway, thanks again! The feedback means a lot.
So much to like about this game. It feels a little overwhelming at first with so much info crammed into the tiny canvas. I really like the mining + rpg elements very cool combination. Visually the game looks great, lots of juice and flare, but also feels a bit muddy and noisy. I really think it would have helped to at least have a brighter/more colorful drill to help stand out from the environment.
I couldn't help myself sorry lol
Anyway, great job overall!
1 year ago(+1)
Thanks for playing!
I was thinking maybe a CRT screen filter would've helped, I'll try it after the jam rating period. I like the idea to have the drill stand out from the environment, I'll play around that idea as well. Thanks again!
1 year ago(+1)
Thank you so much for playing and the thorough feedback! I appreciate it!
One thing to note, green doesn't have a cap of ten, it's just that the maximum digits are 2 for the UI counter, so it seems like it's capped, especially on the easy level which is filled with bio tiles. The cap was supposed to be 99, it's currently uncapped.
Regarding balancing and content, you're spot on. Currently increasing the drill power and gathering a lot of dirt is the easiest way to deal with most bosses. The exception is the one in the hard level, which requires you to shield properly because it lashes out a lot of damage.
The reason for that was time, of all things haha. I realized I had to wrap up the game and iron out the kinks, so after I made etherdrill, sacriguard (useless) and sparklers (strongest if you don't focus on one particular stat), I was running out of time and still had to fix some things. I had two plans: one was to make stronger versions of elemental attacks that used less dirt, and the other was to put elements on enemies so attacks would be less effective or super effective on them. I had to cut that to deliver the game on time. But maybe I'll keep working on it and make a post jam version.
Sure!
I'm currently kinda on a sabbatical of sorts, so I won't go back to my "official" job (I'm a software engineer) until next year. So I have a lot of time in my hands, and I've been using a ton of it on honing my game dev skills.
On this game, I worked about 8-9 hours a day give or take, I missed a couple of days but on the last day I worked like 15h.
1 year ago(+1)
Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!
Power-ups while gathering resources is a very neat idea. During development I thought of implementing buried "badges" that would change some aspects of your gathering/combat, such as doubling your fire damage and increasing speed. I ended up having no time to implement it though, haha.
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